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Saturday, April 26, 2008

Lost has gotten a bit grim

Wherein are we still waiting for Christmas to happen?

Very interesting Lost, extremely well done. I just found it too grim and depressing to enjoy. Based on the flash forwards we've seen, the future is filled with pain, regret, and undying anger. Wheee!

Secondly, that confrontation between Ben and Charles reminded me of the Risk game the Lockeaways play. It's like they're just playing a game with the island, manipulating their players. I wonder if Boone, Shannon, the tailies (except Bernard), etc. were all just casualties of dice rolls. I also wonder why Ben can't kill Charles.

...reminded me of Homeward Bounders by Diana Winny Jones. Here's some stuff near the beginning of the book.

The one of Them nearest me walked round behind me and shut the door. "Another random factor," he said. He sounded annoyed.

And the other one said, "We'd better deal with that before we go on then."

"How?" asked the first one, coming back round me to the machines. "Can we afford a corpse at the stage? I do wish we could without these randoms."

"Oh, but we can't," said the other. "We need them. Besides, the risk adds to the fun. I think we'd better discard this one to the Bounder circuits—but let's get a readout first on the effect of a corpse on play."

As I sit here, it's true! They said all that, talking about me just as if I were a wooden counter or a piece of card in a game.

The second one came sweeping towards me. The first was standing with his hand ready on a handle of some kind. The second one spoke to me, slowly and carefully, as if I was an idiot. "You are now a discard," he said. "We have no further use for you in play. You are free to walk the Bounds as you please, but it will be against the rules for you to enter play in any world. To ensure you keep this rule, you will be transferred to another field of play every time a move ends in the field where you are. The rules also state that you are allowed to return Home if you can. If you succeed in returning Home, then you may enter play again in the normal manner."

**************It was on this world that I began to understand that They hadn't told me even half the rules. They had just told me the ones that interested Them. On this world I was starved and hit, and buried under a collapsed slag-heap. I'm not going to describe it. I hate it too much. I was there twice too, because what happened was that I got caught in a little ring of worlds and went all around the ring two times. At this time, I thought they were all the worlds there were—except for Home, which I never seemed to get to—and I thought of them as worlds, which they are not, not really.

They are separate universes, stacked in together like I saw the triangular rooms of Them before They sent me off. These universes all touch somewhere and where they touch is the Boundary. If one of Them has finished his move, we get twitched into the Boundary in another Earth, in another universe.

But I was going to tell you about the rules that They didn't tell me. I mentioned some of the trouble I had in the mining world. I had more in other worlds. And none of these things killed me. Call it Rule One. A random factor like me, walking the Bounds, has to go on. Nothing is allowed to stop him. The only way he can stop is to come Home.

People can't interfere with a Homeward Bounder either. That may be part of Rule One, but I prefer to call it Rule Two....The only one I didn't feel bad about was a rotten Judge who was going to put me in prison for not being able to bribe him. The roof of the courthouse fell in on him.

Rule Three isn't too good either. Time doesn't act the same in any world. It sort of jerks about as you go from one to another. But time hardly acts at all on a Homeward Bounder.

I don't think we're dealing with overlapping worlds, but based on last night's conversation Ben and Charles do seem to be playing by a set of rules that requires them to use others as pawns or proxies. Or they're both just evil f'tards who enjoy killing people.